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“shmiracles! I will have your little tea babies for this one :) i think there IS magic in this box after all.
So part of the reason i REALLY wanted to try this tea is that there’s an ongoing joke...”
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“Sipdown, 167.
When I started this note I was angry at having not gotten my car back from the mechanic even though he promised it to me today, but I just got a call and it’s done. This is especially...”
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From Mariage Frères

The heritage of “sweet treats”—gourmandises—is more than a mere childhood memory.
The evocative flavours of those creamy, fruity, wonderfully smooth and mouth-filling delights can still inhabit our lives. Rediscover the warmth of childhood treats through a succulent yet mischievous new composition—a fountain of youth concocted from black tea flavoured as mousse au chocolat.
It has been lovingly wrapped in a colourful, paper-covered canister with decorative silver motifs harking back to the blissful days of yore.

48 Tasting Notes

shmiracles! I will have your little tea babies for this one :) i think there IS magic in this box after all.

So part of the reason i REALLY wanted to try this tea is that there’s an ongoing joke in my family about mousse au chocolat. My grandmere? She was from belgium and back in the day was one of the few woman in her day to train at le cordon bleu. It was there that she learned to make mousse au chocolat. As the story goes, she taught my dad to cook and shared with him the family recipe for mousse au chocolat. My entire life i have heard about my grandmere and her famous mousse au chocolat. Which my dad promised me when i was about 7, he would teach me to make…which he has never made in his life for us…which he still has not taught me how to make. And folks? i LOOOOOVVVEEEEE real mousse au chocolat…not to be confused with “chocolate mousse,” that they often serve in restaurants here in canada…which never seems as delicious as it ought to be…as the mousse au chocolat that i’ve had in france.

So when i found out about this tea via shmiracles, i had to try it AND coicidentally my parents were in Paris at the time. So my dad got an email from me: If you can manage it, i’d love for you to pick up this tea while you’re in Paris. I figure it’s the least you can do since you refuse to share grandmere’s recipe with me. :) All in fun of course. So now they’re back…and i suspect they found it somewhere in Paris, since i clearly challenged my father, but i won’t know until i see them again.

So for now, i’m content with this sample from Shmiracles…which is downright amazing! I lost track of steeping it..but this is delicious. It’s not sweet, it’s more like a rich dark chocolate mousse. i think with a bit of milk and sugar, this would turn into an amazing cup of chocolate goodness, but i love this the way it is. Dark and sinfully delicious.

The MF Héritage Gourmand teas sound pretty amazing. If only the MF site worked on my computer, I’d be in tea ordering heaven. It’s probably a good thing for my bank account that it keeps freezing on me, although I’d love to try some of them one day. Yum! That’s all I have to say.

i think someone had mentioned there are charges added on when they arrive here too. So the only reason i have any MF teas is because my parents or friends have gone to Paris (or through swaps) I DID find a place online that you can order from but it’s a limited selection and obviously doesn’t have any of these special ones. I can share that when i’m home later if you like.

Yeah, the other downside is I’ve heard rumors that the tea MF sends to distributors for North America is sort of their…leftovers, like, the surplus selection. Explains why the choice is so limited at the places that do carry it over here. Alas.

I like Mariage Frères very much, they are so very reliable to me though they price things at precisely the top end of how much I would ever consider paying for something. I have never ordered from their site though, because I can find their teas locally, including (luckily) a few of their teas by the weight which is so much more affordable. I pay from 7 to 11 euros per 100 grams for their teas by the weight. The regular black and gold tins are usually from 16 to 19 euros though I lucked out on a half price promotion once and got a stock.Their shipping costs usually start at 25-30 euros though they seem almost flat rate, whether you order 200 grams or 2 kilos, it makes little difference to price.

Heritage Gourmand or the yearly Sakuras, or the new Lily of the Valley or the colored cannisters for destinations (Maharajs) or the totally droolworthy glass apotechary style cannisters for teas to do iced (40 euros! 40 euros) are a different thing from their regular tea and priced much more than their loose leaf teas- I think they are geared for tin collectors (they know me very well, b**tards) or as gifts, so they are very expensive IMO, 25 euros and more for a tin of 100 grams of tea. I have so far resisted.

And if you are likely to be tempted, never ever ever check their teapots and teaware. I am ignoring it all, and pretending never ever seen it.

But weird as it is, how expensive their collector tins and teaware and fancy stuff like jellies and all; the loose leaf by the weight regular teas are priced OK indeed – or better said they are priced high-endish for the sort of tea they are, but are usually top quality for the kind of tea they are and worth it IMO.

When I started this note I was angry at having not gotten my car back from the mechanic even though he promised it to me today, but I just got a call and it’s done. This is especially important because I am driving it to DC tomorrow!

Anyway, this tea was made to soothe me… This time I made it strong with milk and sugar and it is deeeelish. So so chocolatey, and more mousse-like now. An indulgence, but a slightly less indulgent than actual chocolate mousse.

2013-04-26
wow there are huge chunks of chocolate in this tea. mega decadent!
and dark. a dark decadent tea. it’ll be easy to drink this one up.
and i bet it will be AMAZING as a latte. like it should be outlawed or something.
dramatic effect.

haha my mom got it in her head that that was the one tea she had to get me…so her and dad were calling around to stores etc while they were there. It might be re-stocked i suppose but they had difficulty finding it…still not sure if they managed it since they’re keeping the tea they bought me a surprise heh

I know I should offer more description, but all I can say is this: One of my students has a french au pair nanny who brings her to her lessons. I might ask her to pick up some of this when she goes home for a visit. We’ve had some nice conversaions about tea, & what a wonderful company mariage Freres is.

Ughghgh I’m so behind on my NaNoWriMo project. I hate to think it, but I might not finish by the 30th this year…I’m just above 12000 words. There is still a bunch of music to prepare for upcoming concerts, including one tomorrow! Oh well, thus is life…

I’ll do my best! LOL!
Sil, I think you’re the same age as my oldest daughter, so theoretically, I could be your mother!
But I like being sisters better!
Shelley, I’m also the oldest sister. One of my sisters is on Steepster, MsWhatsit. The youngest sister is not, but I think eventually she might be.

The sister of whom I spoke is on here too, but not active. she drinks tea b/c I drink tea and she joined steepster b/c Im on Steepster (sweet little 15y/o protégé she is) but I coudln’t get her motivated to keep a tea log. She has a single tasting note. But she reads mine sometimes. she is ‘mountainfountain’ with an avatar of her super creepily cute cat ( the archetypal cat of so-cute-its-scary).

I had a cup of this last night while I started working on my French again (Je suis une femme! That’s about all I learned. Oh and the repeated use of Les robes et la pomme sont rouges. Got old. Quickly.)

This one is good though not as awesome as the macaron one. It was chocolatey but subtle about it. The black tea blends in really well with the chocolate flavor, which almost borders more on the taste of cacao nibs or cocoa powder rather than like milk chocolate. I really wanted to add a little milk and sugar but got distracted, so definitely next time to make it a bit more like mousse. It’s definitely really, really rich and decadent.

I was pretty excited about this one. the leaves look and smell good enough to eat! The brewed cup isn’t quite so decadent (for me, anyway). It’s got a sort of tart or liquor-like flavor about it. The chocolate is there, but I’m not too fond of liquor flavor with occasional exceptions. I was hoping for more of a creamy backdrop for the chocolate.

But this really is all for the best. I still fear the day when I am tempted to spend more on shipping than on the tea in order to get it from afar!

Preparation

Basically the closest that tea can get to hot chocolate. Almost (only almost!) could take care of my chocolate cravings. It’s downright cocoa-y. I did not try this without milk, so of course that could have added quite a bit of creaminess to it. I’m really enjoying it – definitely a successful chocolate-flavored black.

Flavors: Chocolate, Cocoa, Cream

Preparation

And yet another CharlotteZero sample. This is definitely one of the better (and more authentic) chocolate teas I’ve had. It’s slightly bitter, like real dark chocolate, and smooth and rich. Chocolate teas aren’t really my thing, but even so if this weren’t so expensive I might consider picking some up in the future. Given how pricey the Héritage Gourmand tins are, though, I probably won’t.

I really wanted to try the Raspberry Mousse de Chocolat from MissB, but I figured it was probably a better idea to try the plain chocolate version for comparrison’s sake. So I made up a mug of this with some milk in it.

With the inclusion of milk this tastes spectacularly like chocolate milk; especially the more it cools down. I’m not a big chocolate tea lover, especially when blends use chocolate chips over cacao shells or nibs, but I’m enjoying this one. It’s pretty darn rich with a smooth black base and silky mouthfeel. Milk only enhances this!

I don’t think I’d want to stock this one because of how simple it is and because I know I don’t crave chocolate teas that often, and am starting to prefer straight blacks with cocoa notes over flavoured cocoa teas. But this is well done regardless, chocoholics would like it! It makes me excited for its raspberry counterpart as well! The inclusion of another flavour will greatly round this one out, in my opinion.

A huge thank you to VariaTEA for giving me a sample of this tea! I’ve been super curious, but haven’t had the chance to really get my hands on any of this previously.

The dry tea smells very chocolatey, and cacao nibs are clearly visible – I don’t always like the inclusion of cacao nibs for whatever reason, and the smell of the blend came off to me as a bit fakey, so I was prepared not to overly care for it. Sadly, I was a bit wrong. It’s way better steeped. Like liquid dark, fruity chocolate. Maybe a touch artificial, but it’s so rich and creamy. And dark. I do quite like it. Not enough to pay the extravagant prices that it costs, though, but it will remain in my head as a great chocolate tea to recommend. The only thing that would maybe make it better would be some cacao shell and perhaps a bit of base tea roastiness. (But then I’m probably turning it into LBCG… which is my all-time chocolate favourite).

(Oh, also I steeped this for 4 minutes by accident. It was fine. So the black base here is clearly pretty forgiving.)